The KonMari movement has been one of the most significant trends of the last several months. Japanese organizing consultant turned Netflix superstar and best-selling author Marie Kondo encourages people to declutter their space by letting go of objects that no longer serve their intended purpose or “spark joy.” As her website says, “Thank them for their service — then let them go.”
The value of this philosophy extends far beyond letting go of unnecessary clothes and books. Enterprises caught in the throes of information overload and tool proliferation would benefit from doing some decluttering of their own.
The Three-Pronged Paradox
Knowledge workers have access to more data and information today than we could have even imagined just a couple of decades ago. They can send a message to someone on the other side of the world and receive a response in mere seconds.
But while big data and digital transformation have had an incredibly positive impact on how companies operate and make money, we’ve now reached a breaking point. From instant messaging to spreadsheets and reports, knowledge workers are so inundated with information across so many platforms that they don’t know how to cut through the chaos to identify and prioritize what matters most.
The majority of workers switch apps 10 times per hour, resulting in 32 days of lost workplace productivity per year, according to recent research by RingCentral. The same report finds workers use an average of four communication apps, with 20% using six or more tools.
Workers need a single source of truth that integrates with other systems to provide always-updated information and minimize the need to toggle between tabs. Not only does this allow workers to zero in on the most impactful work, but it also boosts productivity and lowers stress.
At the same time, IT departments everywhere are struggling to manage these countless tools and effectively balance access controls and data security with transparency, visibility, and collaboration. Adding to the complexity are the executives desperately trying to align entire companies around shared objectives and deliver unified customer experiences.
These seemingly conflicting needs have created a three-pronged paradox that requires a new way to manage work.
Decluttering Your Tech Stack
At the end of the day, every company is a team of teams. From marketing and sales to customer success and finance, they all need to be connected — securely, of course — and have the ability to work cross-functionally with one another.
But progress and productivity slow down or come to a screeching halt when work moves from one of these teams to another. Handoffs are often sloppy or missed altogether because different teams use different tools. Projects are delayed, objectives are misaligned, and time is wasted chasing down missing information.
The proliferation of SaaS offerings and apps that solve problems you never knew you had has reached a point of diminishing returns. It’s time to declutter our technology stacks. Where are there redundancies? Which tools didn’t live up to their promises? Are there any that can and should be connected? And while we’re at it, which tools fail to balance visibility and security or improve the customer experience?
It’s time to streamline technology stacks to improve efficiencies, empower teams, and rekindle the joy of work. This requires a unique solution that supports both autonomy and integration, and serves as a centralized hub for connecting people, processes, and technology.
Introducing Spaces and Wrike Integrate
When I started Wrike in 2006, I was determined to build a platform that cuts out the clutter and enables strong collaboration and workflows between not only workers within the same team, but those across teams as well. I knew it was imperative that Wrike be a single digital workplace where individuals, teams, and cross-functional departments could all collaborate and thrive.
Today we’re launching 2 exciting Wrike updates that help us achieve this goal: Spaces and Wrike Integrate. Spaces provides a fresh, clean workspace for our customers, while Wrike Integrate makes it easier than ever to connect Wrike with the tools you love.
Spaces
Wrike has made it easy for users to organize and manage their work using folders, projects, workflows, and tasks. Spaces now makes it possible to configure unique workspaces designed to house all relevant information and tools teams need, eliminating the need for the IT hacks and Frankensteined additions required by enterprises to make traditional collaborative work management platforms fit their complex needs.
Spaces provides teams with:
- A simplified, highly organized, and more-focused user experience tailored to each team’s unique needs, with a centralized hub for all relevant assets, tools, and resources.
- The ability to assign default workflows, create associated dashboards and request forms, house relevant templates, and more, so teams spend less time searching for work and more time being productive.
- A new Personal Space for team members to manage and complete tasks in the way that best fits their working style.
- More precise and secure control over how information is distributed to cross-functional teams through distinct access roles and permissions for Space and non-Space members.
- The ability to align teams on overarching priorities and objectives while minimizing distractions and creating a highly relevant work experience.
Spaces has already begun rolling out to all Wrike customers. For questions, please contact your Wrike representative or visit our Help Center.
Wrike Integrate
Today’s workflows span countless apps, teams, and locations. Traditionally, however, integrations have been focused on connecting specific applications — not automating entire workflows.
While Wrike has always been proud of our robust API, Wrike Integrate makes it easier than ever to easily connect our platform to the other apps used across your business, as well as deeply customize those integrations to streamline and support your unique workflows. Wrike Integrate makes it possible for companies to:
- Move beyond basic, one-off integrations to comprehensive workflow automation quickly and easily.
- Seamlessly automate complex workflows at scale across people and teams, with pre-built connectors to more than 400 cloud and on-premises apps and the ability to connect to thousands more through universal connectors.
- Customize Wrike with unique automations by effectively integrating Wrike with itself, enabling companies to make Wrike work precisely how they need it to.
- Leverage prepackaged, automated workflows, saving time, money, and the hassle of creating them from scratch.
- Break down silos between various teams and applications, reduce the effort and errors of manual workflows, and remove integration and automation workflow gaps.
Wrike Integrate is an add-on feature available to Business, Enterprise, and Wrike for Marketers plan customers today. For more information about Wrike Integrate, please visit: www.wrike.com/add-on-wrike-integrate.
The addition of Integrate and Spaces has cemented Wrike’s position as a simultaneously team-centric and enterprise-centric platform. IT can now deploy Wrike knowing that every team in the enterprise can configure it to suit their specific needs while keeping everyone — and all their data — in a single platform, making Wrike the system of record for the enterprise.
Paradox Solved
While most collaborative work management solutions were originally built for individual teams, Wrike Integrate and Spaces make it possible for enterprises to easily configure a single tool for every department and team, and for work to flow seamlessly through the enterprise and at scale.
Teams now have a space optimized for their unique needs. Executives have a single platform that gets the whole company rowing in the same direction. And IT capacity is reduced with a streamlined tech stack with secure, centralized data management.
Teams should no longer be forced to use one-size-fits-all work management solutions that fail to meet their needs or siloed collaboration tools that only solve a fraction of their problems.
Read the full Spaces and Wrike Integrate announcement here.
